Omegle: "How I got the dangerous chat site closed down"

Going after the abuser... of course.

Going after a video chat application because it is unable to provide personalized human monitoring for every conversation, is insane.

Meanwhile no doubt a dozen competitors just got a boost in traffic.

Omegle had the obligation to protect their users, specially if they are minors. It lacked the tools and the moderation. I'm glad it is gone.

Never realised that Omegle had become a platform for the creeps. She sued for $22 million. I don't see anything heroic in that, despite her tragic circumstances. But I really wonder what the authorities where doing - if paedophiles were using the platform, sounds like it would have been easy to identify and trap them.

Internet is sufficiently pervasive nowadays that is it probably no longer practical for parents to directly supervise children all the time they are using it.

Strong parental controls on the devices the kids use might work but there are some major holes in that approach. The big one is that nearly everyone has one or more internet access devices. It is not hard for a kid to find someone else's device to use.

Sites are probably going to need to bite the bullet and at a minimum not allow interaction between anonymous users and children. That probably will require some sort of age verification.

Age verification can be done in a way that doesn't reveal anything to the site other than that the person is not a child and doesn't reveal to anyone other than the site that the person visited the site. But it can also be done in a way that gives the site much more information and reveals to third parties that you visited the site.

It might be a good idea for people concerned about privacy to get ahead on this one, recognize that age verification is probably going to become a requirement, and instead of just lobbying against all age verification also work to ensure that when that fails and we do get mandated age verification we get the kind that only reveals age to the site and doesn't reveal to anyone else what site age was verified for.

Omegle cannot perfectly protect their users from other users, and cannot determine who is a minor without ID verification (as we have seen in Virginia and Mississippi for porn sites).

They clearly want the entire product category illegal. Omegle might be gone, but many similar services remain.